"I feel like my brain is running a constant ticker tape"
Finding calm under capitalism #2
Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
It’s a funny thing, sitting down to write about overwhelm. How do I pin down this thing that is, by its very nature, so irrepressible? Also, I find that I feel hesitant about sharing. It sounds daft coming from someone who used to write about sex, but the thing about overwhelm is that it makes me feel completely crazy. I’ve had my ups and downs with sex but it’s never made me feel like I was literally going insane.
I’m not sure if I want other people to see that side of me. But at the same time, that’s precisely what I want. As I said last week, I’m dying to have some real, meaty conversations about this. I want to know how it feels in your brain and what behaviours you exhibit or try to adopt in order to deal with it. So I too need to be honest. But it’s hard because, while I want to represent myself accurately, I don’t want to seem unhinged. I don’t want you to think I’m “not coping.” Equally, I want you to know that, a lot of the time, I don’t feel like I am.
I don’t think it’s altogether my fault. I think the majority of us are trying to do a hell of a lot while being stuck in some very bad systems. But I cannot relinquish responsibility entirely. I feel very resistant to the idea that I am the problem, partly because that’s what capitalism wants me to think, but also because it’s painful to have your flaws pointed out to you. But I have to concede it is possible there are ways in which I might be making my life harder. And so I feel like if I can bring myself to be unvarnished, I can not only encourage you to do the same, and start the conversation I want to have, I can also open the door to discovery.
Because this is quite personal, it’ll be behind the paywall but here are a few of the top lines to whet your appetite…
I don’t push through. I fought this battle for many years but I’m pleased to say that at the age of 41, I finally know when to step away and take a break. Even when I’m on deadline. Even when it feels like I’ll never get through everything.
But sometimes I do get fixated on things. To the point that I can’t leave them alone and then suddenly it’s 3pm and I haven’t eaten and I end up inhaling half a block of cheese while trying to figure out what to have for lunch.
I will never cancel plans because of overwhelm. On the contrary, having fun plans, things that relax and replenish me, is an integral part of how I manage stress.
Exercise is non-negotiable. The rumours are true. Exercise really is the quickest way to clear my head and boost my mood. 20-something me could never.
I use a lot of organisational tools. I start to get a bit screwy when I’m holding a lot in my head. I have to get it out and onto paper so I can look at it calmly. I use things like Trello, Motion, Google sheets, my Notes app as well as endless physical notebooks, to help me break things down and figure out how to fit them in.
Sleep is sacred. My brain can’t handle anything when I’m tired. And now that I have children, there is no such thing as “catching up on sleep”. So I have to make it my religion. There is virtually nothing I will prioritise over getting enough sleep.
I’m neurotypical. Our brains are all so different and what is a stress trigger for one person may not bother another one in the slightest and that’s as much to do with our background, occupation, living conditions, mental health, and overall temperament as it is to do with neuro-status. But I am aware there may be elements of what I say that will jar with other people’s experience of the world, and so I just wanted to acknowledge that. Please don’t compare yourself to me or interpret what I say as universal advice. It’s not. It’s just what works (and doesn’t) for me.
Okay, are you ready? I’m ready. Let’s dive in.
I feel like my brain is running a constant ticker tape.
I have this cartoon image of it, speeding up as more things get added to my mental load. The ticking is getting louder, tape is spooling everywhere, and suddenly smoke starts coming out of the machine. People are running around trying to figure out how to turn this bloody thing off, pressing buttons, flicking toggles, but nothing works. They even pull the cable out of the wall socket but it’s no good, it’s got a mind of its own. It’s just going and going and then it catches fire and no amount of water is putting it out, and even when you lock it in a safe and throw it over a cliff it’s still just ticking away, and eventually there’s nothing else for it, you’ve got to drop an anvil on it.
Overwhelm, for me, feels like a kind of tightening in my head.
Rather than a sense of spiralling-out, it feels like everything is crowding in, pushing down. My head feels literally too full, like it might burst. I can’t think straight, I can’t make decisions. It’s suffocating and all I want is to escape it. I find myself wishing I could switch myself off. Or switch my brain off. Weirdly, I often feel like I want to go to sleep, even though I’m super wired, because what I crave is unconsciousness. Other times, when the overwhelm feels more external (endless jobs needing doing around the house, children making sixty million demands a minute) my urge to escape is more literal. I fantasise about just walking out the door. I don’t have a plan about where I would go, it’s just the desire to get the fuck out.
I feel on the edge of overwhelm most days.
But the last time I really lost my shit was at the end of January when my daughter got diagnosed with a chest infection. She has chest infections a lot, and has been admitted to hospital about four or five times in the last year, so her health is kind of an ongoing background source of stress. She’d been wobbly for a while, spiking a temperature here, needing a day off nursery there, and I’d finally taken her to the doctor’s who had prescribed antibiotics. So I was relieved on the one hand but I was also just feeling fraught because we had no idea at that point why it kept happening, it was requiring me to take so much time off work, often at a moment’s notice, and I just felt like “I can’t go on like this.” I was just coming to the end of the podcast series which I had thrown everything into, but which hadn’t quite got us the listener figures or paid supporters we needed to make it sustainable so I was quite depleted, both energetically and creatively. Happily, I had a weekend away with my husband booked for my birthday which I was desperately looking forward to, but I was worried we wouldn’t be able to go if our daughter was too sick. So it all kind of came to a head.
That’s the kind of situation in which I start fantasising about tradwifing. Clearly, my daughter’s health is the priority, so as I cast around to see which balls I could drop in order to escape the overwhelm, the only one that presents itself is my career. Obviously now, writing this, that sounds silly. But in the moment, when I’m fizzing with stress, my brain can’t think beyond binaries.
Literally just walking into my kitchen can trigger overwhelm.
Look in any direction in my house and I see Things That Need Doing. It could be the washing up, or toys that need putting away, or a random shoe in the hallway that reminds me that I need to take my boots to be fixed, and that my son needs new wellies, or a council tax bill on the side that reminds me I need to call the council, which reminds me I need to call the locksmith, and the garage, and the electrician, and, and, and…
I don’t always help myself here because I do like to give myself jobs to do. There are so many things I could feasibly ignore but my brain goes “Yeah or… how about we solve that problem?” I’ve noticed recently that my phone is a big part of this. At any given moment I can have an idea and immediately start looking up what to do or where to get the things I need. My husband took my son out for a bike ride on Saturday morning. I watched him load the bike into the car, which it is very nearly too big for, and before I knew it I had three tabs open looking for bike racks. Yes, we probably do need a bike rack but we don’t need it right now. Right now, I’ve got my two-year-old simultaneously demanding a snack, wanting to go out on her bike, and telling me she’s done a poo in the potty. Those are the things I need to attend to, not Googling fucking bike racks. But that’s what having my phone in my hand does.
It’s not that I’m bad at compartmentalising.
It’s just that things don’t stay in their compartments for very long. I can keep them there while I’m doing other things but I have to be really focussed. If I let my mind wander, they’ll come crowding back in. This is why being intentional is a really big part of my coping strategy. A lot of the things I prioritise in my leisure time are things that require me to be really present and engaged, because that’s when I feel most relaxed. And I try to bring that knowledge into other parts of my life as well. You could call it mindfulness, but I think of it more as intentionality.
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I’ve dipped in and out of meditation.
But I can’t seem to get it to stick. I find it hard, but that’s not really the issue. I know that quieting my mind entirely is not doable and it’s not really the goal, it’s the process of noticing and choosing to “come back to the breath” or whatever. And I have actually had a few moments over the years where I really did feel like I’d tapped into something, like “Oh my god, I think I’m actually doing it!” but then I’d catch myself thinking that and it’d all come crumbling down. But it’s definitely relaxing. I know that because of how many times I’ve nodded off while doing it. So, generally I'm a big fan of meditation but at the end of the day, I just can’t make myself prioritise it. I just think I have other things in my life that have a calming effect and that I enjoy more.
Admittedly no one is forcing me to be poly.
But at the same time, I think being able to pursue connection and intimacy and sex whenever I want to, and with whomever I want, is a big part of how I retain a sense of freedom and agency despite the whole crazy lady ticker tape situation. Also, sex, when it's good, just blasts all the other shit out the window. But there are times, when I’m looking at my calendar and trying to work out when I can fit everybody in, when I have to wonder why I’m doing this to myself.
There are days, too, when I just don’t have anything left to give. Having kids means having people demand things of you All The Time. Even when they’re not physically there, I am meeting or pre-empting their needs. So I do struggle with partners who want a lot from me (see: the woman who dumped me because I didn’t text her enough). When I’m feeling frazzled, it’s hard to not read a bid for connection from a partner - or even a friend, tbh - as a demand. I’m working on it. And I do also acknowledge that this is a situation of my own making. The way I see it, being non-monog is the ultimate faff to fun equation. It’s a huge amount of faff - just endless, silly levels of faff. But it’s also a ridiculous amount of fun.
I’ve read a lot of books on managing overwhelm.
Some of them, like Drop The Ball, by Tiffany Dufu, and How To Not Hate Your Husband After Kids, by Jancee Dunn (which I didn’t finish because I got busy lol forever), are specifically aimed at parents. Many address the challenge of dividing domestic labour equally. But some, like Do Less, by Kate Northrup, and The Idle Parent, by Tom Hodgkinson (which I actually haven’t read yet but it’s on my bedside table), are more about shaking off societal expectations about being constantly “on it”.
(I also bought and attempted to implement the Fair Play system but like Olga Khazan in The Atlantic, I came up against the fact that I was the only person in my marriage who thought it necessary and therefore the only person who was actually prepared to adhere to it.)
How To Keep House While Drowning, by KC Davies, is actually aimed at people with ADHD, which I do not have, but it nevertheless helped me understand and reframe a lot of my feelings about, specifically, cleaning and tidying. And Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, which I loved and which I’ve talked about before, addresses the ways in which tech, and particularly social media, contribute to our overwhelm.
Of these, I would probably only actively recommend Drop The Ball and Do Nothing. But there are bits from each that I have taken and tried to build into my life.
I manage overwhelm with discipline.
I know, I know. I sound monstrous. Perhaps I am monstrous. But wrangling stress, for me, requires vigilance. I have to be able to spot when I’m doing something that’s going to make it worse and find a way to re-route myself. On the plus side, this means I am also really disciplined about making time for pleasure and fun, because I know how important they are, both for immediate stress relief, and also the role they play over the longer term in helping me recharge and feel replenished.
I’m going to share my personal set of rules for dealing with overwhelm next week, but I’d say the number one thing is getting enough sleep. I am fanatical about sleep. This is partly because I am still scarred from baby-related sleep deprivation. But also because I know myself now and my brain simply cannot function on less-than. What constitutes less-than will be different for all of us but for me it’s eight hours. Ideally I’d have nine hours sleep a night but eight is my absolute minimum if I want to be on top of my shit the next day. Aiming for nine also mitigates for the possibility of being woken up by my toddler which I would say happens about 2-3 nights out of seven at the moment.
I still suck at zeroing in.
When I read How To Keep House While Drowning, I really identified with the way she described finding it difficult to complete a task because you’d inevitably spot another one mid-way through and get distracted. I don’t have ADHD but spotting tasks mid-task is something I definitely relate to and it’s a big source of overwhelm for me. The best illustration I ever saw of this was in French artist Emma’s comic about the mental load.
To combat this, I have a lot of to-do lists and task managers and workflows to help me break things down into small steps and figure out what to prioritise. I then try very very hard to just do one job at a time and remind myself that trying to “just quickly” do something else in the middle is not efficient, but it is really difficult. I feel like there are always other tasks, other demands nibbling at the edges of my focus.
Flow is good, fixation not so much.
As long as I can minimise distractions, I don’t find it particularly hard to get into flow with creative work. But sometimes flow can turn into fixation and that’s something I don’t love. It’s where I get obsessively into a task to the point that I can’t leave it alone. I keep going “I’ll just quickly do this” and “let me just do that.” Meanwhile, I haven’t been to the loo in six hours. And then suddenly it’s 3pm and I’m starving and I end up inhaling half a block of cheese while trying to figure out what to have for lunch. When my husband started working from home during the pandemic, he was horrified to discover my “chaos lunch” habit. It seems so out of character. I wish I could stop, but I also think a part of me likes it. I think my brain feels like it's been let out of its cage in those moments and it needs to be allowed to run free for a bit.
My pet hate is being told to delegate.
Respectfully, WHO THE FUCK TO??!! If you’re single, you don’t necessarily have anyone who can take on your life admin. And even if you’re in a relationship, there is a limit to how much stuff can actually be delegated because the person you’re in a relationship with is also an entire human with their own stuff going on. Most of us have not got a cohort of helpers sitting around waiting to be assigned tasks. And while there may be people in our lives who are willing to help out now and again (and we should definitely spend some more time investigating this), there is still too much to do. Ultimately, in my experience, the only real way to delegate is to pay people. And that’s not a sustainable solution for most of us.
I got way too excited this week when I discovered Superdrug had a blister pack recycling centre. Did you know you could recycle your pill packets? ME NEITHER!
I will say, though, this is absolutely one of the ways I make life harder for myself. I am fanatical about recycling and reusing and I actually get a little bit anxious about the thought of sending something to landfill needlessly. All of which is very virtuous but it does mean I spend a LOT of time and energy researching how and where to recycle/reuse/donate/sell things and then the actual act of doing so gets added to my already heaving to-do list.
Case in point: This week I finally got around to organising a donation of baby gear - buggy, high chair, travel cot etc - and an absolute tonne of kids clothes that had been sitting in the corner of my office (and on my to-do list) for OVER A YEAR. Man, that felt good. But what a huge job.
Anyway, I’d be really interested to hear from other people about the mental load of saving the planet because on the one hand literally what could be more important, but on the other hand I’m already drowning.
